Most major providers of telecommunications services, such as AT&T, now rely primarily on optical fiber cables to carry traffic. As compared to copper cables and microwave transmission facilities previously used to carry telecommunication traffic, optical fiber cables offer higher traffic capacity and provide higher quality. Typically, telecommunication providers maintain high capacity fiber routes that run between telecommunications service facilities and lower capacity fiber routes that run between telecommunications facilities and business customers. By comparison, the high capacity routes generally undergo far less maintenance than the lower capacity routes. Such lower capacity routes often require constant re-provisioning because of the increasing demand for telecommunications services by businesses.
In practice, lower capacity routes that serve business customers have a ring configuration with various fiber drops along the ring. Each fiber drop typically serves as a point at which customer traffic enters and exits the ring. Upon a request by a customer for service that may require a change in capacity, an Outside Plant (OSP) technician accesses the ring at a fiber drop and makes one or more splices to provide the desired customer connectivity. To splice the correct fibers to provide the requested connectivity, the technician invariably accesses a splice record, detailing which fibers correspond to particular customers. In the absence of accurate information identifying the fibers corresponding to particular customers, a technician could easily make a mistake, disrupting service.
Traditionally, most telecommunication service providers have maintained paper records containing information about the splices at each fiber drop. Such paper records are cumbersome, and are difficult to maintain and update on a regular basis. More recently, telecommunication service providers have converted such paper records to electronic records stored in a computer database. While electronic record keeping of splice information is less cumbersome, and lends itself to more frequent updating, electronic splice records are not always available to the technician who needs them. Often, the technician must obtain such records at a telecommunications service provider administrative location prior to undertaking any re-provisioning of service.
Some sophisticated providers of the telecommunications service have the capability of transmitting such electronic splice records directly to a terminal within a vehicle operated by the OSP technician. Having the records available at the vehicle does save the OSP technician time, but the technician often must transcribe the electronic record into a paper record to facilitate actual work at the splice location. Errors in transcription can and do occur, leading to possible errors in splicing.
The need to accurately identify attributes of signal carrying members (e.g., wires, fibers and/or cables) also exists other that in connection with splices. In many telecommunications facilities, large numbers of cables, and indeed, large numbers of individual fibers enter and exit various pieces of equipment. While many of such cables and individual fibers do carry physical labels that carry pertinent information, the information content often changes as a result of service re-provisioning. In many instances, the label does not reflect the latest information about the fiber or cable because changes occur far more frequently than frequency at which such labels are updated.
Thus, there is a need for a technique for enabling a technician to obtain and update information about signal-carrying members.